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BOOK REVIEW

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s Hour of the Ox

By Ashley Durrance
AUGUST 25, 2017

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In her most recent collection, Hour of the Ox, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello untangles the sinews of a life that pivots on the loss of a younger brother, a loss she hopes to understand by analyzing the intricacies of her memories. When she remembers the brother, she recalls the vibrant scents of childhood meals—dried squid, quartered tangerines, steaming seaweed—paired with the constant, unexplained sound of roaring waters in the background. Cancio-Bello dedicates her collection to “every brother [she’s] ever had, remembered or not,” an indication to the reader of the elusive spirit that continues to follow the poet, and will soon trail the reader too.

The first poem in the collection, “Anti-Elegy,” introduces us to the voices of spirits that resurface throughout the book. It is a poem written for loved ones who have passed yet remain vibrantly alive in the poet’s life, no matter that their physical bodies are gone. This “anti-elegy” is for the poet’s parents and for the sea, but mostly for her brother, “who did not die / no matter how many times we killed him.” With this, she reminds herself that her deceased sibling is not and will not ever be truly gone, and that he will remain present in her life regardless of how often she attempts to bury him. “Anti-Elegy” serves as an emblem for all the other poems in Hour of the Ox: it reminds us of life’s inability to end, of how each day is accompanied by the reverberations of souls once known.

When the brother appears in the poems, he takes the form of a reincarnated beast or a fascinating phenomenon: a chrysanthemum, an octopus, a heron, a penumbra, or a stone. Unable to shake the feeling of not knowing fully what she has lost, the poet nevertheless understands that the brother remains bound to her as a darkness that will always trail her; in the poem “Brother Returns as Penumbra,” she tells him, “your shadow [is] / sewn to my feet.” Heavy with aquatic imagery, the poem alludes to the brother’s death (which may or may not have been an actual drowning): a rumbling tide and gaping sea recall the cruel occurrence of drowning just as one’s own mind closes and reopens itself after a traumatic loss.

In “Postmarked,” the poet addresses an unnamed reader who is an amalgamation of the lost brother and her past self. The poem takes place in what is labeled initially as “this room,” then “our room,” and, ultimately, “your room.” By charging each consecutive image with more intimacy than its former, it is as if the poet were cutting the strings that she believes still tie her present self to the brother. The poem’s succession of unrhymed couplets undulate in waves of description that articulate a struggle: of natural life against the confines of the “room”—which is “a hotel made of ash or ice”—and of the poet with her own remembering. The poem is intensified by phrases like “endangered rainforest leaves” and “a chandelier of stingray tails” that culminate in a discovery, one that offers the poet a grotesque realization of how such remarkable creatures are too often abused when placed into unrecognizable environments. Like her brother, the beauty of these animals has been minimized, yet somehow intensified. In the end, the poet comprehends that she has been left with only “[a] bed . . . lined with the whisper of saltwater”—a reminder of her inability to keep what does not belong to her, or to anyone.

In the second section of the collection, Cancio-Bello sways from observations of her brother’s death and her family’s unraveling to the powerful, emblematic histories she has been left with. Though her brother continues to return to her, the poet focuses her attention on her grandmother, an empowering pearl diver with lungs that “could swallow entire tides.” The grandmother is complex, tied to fierce marine images: slick sea urchins that threaten to pierce, open-mouthed clams that swallow shining pearls, wetsuits in place of human skin. Pearls are strung through these poems about the grandmother and the mother. In the latter, the white beads become heirlooms; threaded with “old blood,” the pearls are sewn “into [the poet’s] skin: each vertebrae, each tooth” as if a ritual act of becoming a woman. In the former, the poet takes the place of her mother and the other daughters of pearl divers; together, they become pearls of their own with “tongues pressed /. . . until we become them.”

Even as these poems place our attention elsewhere—on the mother and the grandmother—the lost brother remains a feature of these recollections. Each time the brother visits her, the poet predicts that “[she] will not recognize him.” Even when he returns with a “body full of teeth and desire” and with the “smell of dry rain,” the poet strives to interpret what remains undefined.

Hour of the Ox is a body of work filled with solaces, with poems strung together with the pearls of memory, with spiked urchins of loss and regret, and the quiet tides that encourage one to continue living. Rather than situating her writings in remorse and despondence, Cancio-Bello channels her sorrow into images that vibrate with newness and inspire a resurrection of the soul, a dashing away of old grief in place of the desire for renewal, for retelling. “For we are not our own,” the poet tells us plainly. For we will never be one self, but a mass molded by the narratives we do not write.

ASHLEY DURRANCE is a poet from Florida. She serves as an Assistant Editor for Southern Humanities Review.

Hour of the Ox. By Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.